In early June, the MSC Orchestra, a 2,500-passenger cruise ship, entered the Venetian Lagoon at dawn, sailing through St. Mark’s Basin, past the Doge’s Palace and the still-quiet St. Mark’s Square.
It continued its journey through the Giudecca Canal and then docked on Venice’s main island. It was the first time a cruise ship had entered the lagoon since the pandemic hit Italy in February 2020. In a place that is heavily dependent on tourism, and where cruise travel contributes about 3 pc of the local gross domestic product, many in Venice welcomed the ship. But others did not. Among the latter were 2,000 protesters who met the MSC Orchestra when it sailed on its reverse route two days later.
“I hope we made some of the passengers wonder if what they were doing is wrong and think about the social and environmental impact of their vacation,” said Jane da Mosto, a biologist and activist who took part in the protest on a small boat. The pandemic has put Venice’s legendary international tourism influx on hold for more than a year. In doing so, it has sparked an animated debate on how mass tourism has negatively affected both the lagoon’s environment and Venice’s character. In this debate, cruise ships have become a metonym for over-tourism.
The pandemic hiatus has given the city which is celebrating its 1,600th birthday this year a chance to reflect on how tourism’s exponential growth has eroded its social fabric, driving non-touristy businesses and residents out. In the past four decades the city’s historical center (what most Americans mean when they say “Venice”) has lost half of its residents, now down to 50,000.
“The situation is dramatic, there are no houses,” said Maria Fiano, 46, a high school teacher who runs OCIO, an organisation that monitors Venice’s housing. According to her estimates, 42 pc of beds in the center are rented to tourists, which landlords find more profitable, leaving many locals struggling to find a place. But not every tourist has the same cost-benefit ratio. While day trippers including many of those who are cruise passengers amount to 73 pc of visitors, they contribute only 18 pc of the tourism economy. The proportion is inverted for people who spend at least one night at a hotel; they represent 14 pc of visitors, but 48 pc of the business.
In March, the local government of Veneto, Venice’s region, approved a plan vowing to curb hit-and-run visitors and attract more slow-paced ones. They also hope to wean Venice off its over-dependency on tourism, creating new places of employment, including a hydrogen plant, a project still in its embryonic phase, and a recently launched accelerator for renewable energy businesses. “It’s the first time that local authorities formally recognised that mass tourism cannot go on like this forever and that depopulation is a serious problem,” said Fabio Moretti, the dean of Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts, which was involved in the plan along with other academic institutions and the Boston Consulting Group.
The presence of large ships in the lagoon, especially those in the immediate vicinity of Venice’s most precious sites, has raised eyebrows at UNESCO and sparked protests by residents since 2012. They argue that mammoth, fuel-guzzling ships are physically incompatible both with Venice, a two-square-mile island, and the lagoon that surrounds it. (A 2019 study published in Nature asserted that the wakes created by large vessels induced the erosion of the shoreline and, through the “continuous resuspension of sediment in the area,” could redistribute industrial pollutants already present in the lagoon.)It’s not so much the number of visitors they bring overall — only 7 pc of the 27 mn tourists who visited Venice in 2019 were cruise passengers, according to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group — but the fact that they bring thousands of them all at once, overcrowding the city’s historical center while contributing little to its economy.
